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Bonus Thing 1 2014: Building a personal website

Our series of ‘bonus things’ for 2014 provides some extra credit type things that you can do to augment your online presence and the skills in your portfolio. The first bonus thing covers building a personal website.

Why would you need or consider a personal website? You may have a number of good reasons for doing so. A personal website can give access to your various contact details, profiles and provide a good hub for advertising yourself and what you do. It’s great if you have multiple jobs or online ‘personalities’. A writer AND a musician? No worries! Let people know in one place. A personal website is also dynamic; you can update it and change it easily to showcase recent work or alter details.

You don’t need to be able to code in order to create a personal hub page; there are lots of free or low cost and easy ways to do it.

Super easy

If what you want is simply a landing page that you can use to pull together all your information with style, you won’t need more than an hour or so. There are a number of services that do this quite easily.

No coding required, but will require more time, skills and possibly money

If you want to invest a bit more time into a more powerful site, there are a number of options. Just a few:

Squarespace: Not free, but offers an easy-to-use drag and drop interface. For those wanting more functionality.

Wix and Weebly: Easy to use, and allow lots of customisation. Both offer free plans but may require a paid plan to avoid ads or get a custom domain name.

WordPress.org: We’ve recommended wordpress.com’s free blogging tools for your 23 Things blog, but WordPress.org offers more powerful solutions. WordPress now accounts for about 60% of the world’s CMS-based websites! You’ll need to pay for hosting and it can take a bit more work to get things set up, but things like one-click installation help make these processes simple. There’s lots of help online.

Straightforward, but will require some html and/or coding skills

If you have some basic html and/or coding skills, your options grow. Some simple ones: